* May 2011; All the focus was on Linux Mint 11 and it lead to a very nice release. Katya got a formidable echo throughout the community and the decision to stick to Gnome 2.32 didn’t go unnoticed. Our website attracted 14% more people than usual and our user base grew by 10%. This includes people who traditionally switch back to Linux Mint after the stable release, as well as newcomers switching from Mac and Windows, but this time also a lot of unhappy users from other distributions featuring Unity and to a lesser extent Gnome 3. Though it’s nice to see it happen and I hope they get a nice welcome, the main purpose of this decision wasn’t tactical, but rather technical. Mint 11, despite significant regressions (particularly with Compiz), gave us yet another great Gnome desktop and another 6 months to see how things go with the Gnome 3 and GTK3 projects. * In June, the focus will shift towards LMDE which will receive the Mint 11 features, and for which we’re also planning specific improvements (particularly on the installer and the update manager), as well as the KDE and LXDE editions. After this, we’ll be testing different scenarios and considering our options for the future, whether we want to switch to Gnome 3, how ready it is and what can be achieved with it. Many options are there for us, including forking Gnome 2 or even Gnome 3 and it’s too early to say what will happen next. But we have 6 months to decide and as always, we’re quite determined to come with something that’s better than before. We like our desktop the way it is, and comes Linux Mint 12, we’ll be looking to bring you something either as good or better than what we already have. It’s a hard promise to make considering the drastic changes occurring upstream, but this is what we’re aiming for and so we’ll be looking into the most efficient ways to implement our desktop and to reach our goals. * Although the donations weren’t as high as last month, we actually received money from more people this time around. I’d like to thank all the people who donated to Linux Mint, many thanks for supporting us! Our sponsors are high, and advertising generated more than usual due to the increases in traffic and user base. Overall we’re up 0.7% compared to April.